Asynchronous binaural spatial audition sensor with 2x64x4 channel output

Abstract

This paper proposes an integrated event-based binaural silicon cochlea system aimed at efficient spatial audition and auditory scene analysis. The cochlea chip has a matched pair of digitally-calibrated 64-stage cascaded analog second-order filter banks with 512 pulse-frequency modulated (PFM) address-event representation (AER) outputs. The quality factors (Qs) of channels are individually adjusted by local DACs. The 2P4M 0.35 um CMOS chip consumes an average power of 14 mW including its integrated microphone preamplifiers and biasing circuits. Typical speech data rates are 10 k to 100 k events per second (eps) with peak output rates of 10 Meps. The event timing jitter is 2 us for a 250 mVpp input. It is shown that the computational cost of an event-driven source localization application can be up to 40 times lower when compared to a conventional cross-correlation approach.